The last couple of weeks have witnessed a slightly-greater-than-usual outbreak of extremely newsworthy nutrition stories that could be described as bad journalism feasting on bad science. The first was a report out of the Harvard School of Public Health that meat-eating apparently causes premature death and disease (here’s how theNew York Timescovered it), and the second out of UC San Diego suggesting that chocolate is a food we should all be eating to lose weight (the Timesagain).

Both of these studies were classic examples of what is known technically as observational epidemiology, a field of research I discussed at great length back in 2007 in a cover article for in the New York Times Magazine. The article was called “Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?” and I made the argument that this particular pursuit is closer to a pseudoscience than a real science.

As a case study, I used a collaboration of researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, led by Walter Willett, who runs the Nurses’ Health Study.And I pointed out that every time that these Harvard researchers had claimed that an association observed in their observational trials was a causal relationship—that food or drug X caused disease or health benefit Y—and that this supposed causal relationship had then been tested in experiment, the experiment had failed to confirm the causal interpretation—i.e., the folks from Harvard got it wrong. Not most times, but every time.

Now it’s these very same Harvard researchers—Walter Willett and his colleagues—who have authored the article from two weeks ago claiming that red meat and processed meat consumption is deadly; that eating it regularly raises our risk of dying prematurely and contracting a host of chronic diseases. Zoe Harcombe has done a wonderful job dissecting the paper at her site. I want to talk about the bigger picture (in a less concise way).

This is an issue about science itself and the quality of research done in nutrition. Science is ultimately about establishing cause and effect. It’s not about guessing. You come up with a hypothesis—force x causes observation y—and then you do your best to prove that it’s wrong. If you can’t, you tentatively accept the possibility that your hypothesis might be right. In the words of Karl Popper, a leading philosopher of science, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.” The bold conjectures, the hypotheses, making the observations that lead to your conjectures… that’s the easy part. The ingenious and severe attempts to refute your conjectures is the hard part. Anyone can make a bold conjecture. (Here’s one: space aliens cause heart disease.) Testing hypotheses ingeniously and severely is the single most important part of doing science.

The problem with observational studies like the ones from Harvard and UCSD that gave us the bad news about meat and the good news about chocolate, is that the researchers do little of this. The hard part of science is left out, and they skip straight to the endpoint, insisting that their causal interpretation of the association is the correct one and we should probably all change our diets accordingly.